The kids are asleep, my houseguest is staying with his boyfriend, David's at work -- I'm alone in the house and OMG I CAN"T HANDLE THIS GAME ALKSFJ:KFDSLKDJF I hope Tom Brady gets frostbite and his balls fall off

I dunno, it's hard to say Brady got outplayed. At best the QB play was a tie, with the tiebreaker being the one time the D got a hand on the ball and one dropped pass. Gisele's still insufferable, tho.

"Sharks do not go around challenging people to games of chance like dojo breakers."

It was an apparently rushed in rule, and is a 15-yard penalty, and may result in ejection from the game.

Personally, I'm glad to see it. Does it change the game? Sure. Probably more than most rule changes. But I don't think it stops good athletes from performing well and separating themselves from other guys. And hopefully it stops guys from bulling their heads into piles and into runners.

"Sharks do not go around challenging people to games of chance like dojo breakers."

I don't think it's quite that clear. As currently constructed the rule is a penalty for lowering the head to initiate contact. A goal line stand is every single player trying to get lower than the guy opposite him, with a running back trying to follow in at the lowest possible pad level. All of that is lowering the head. It isn't "leading with the crown" or helmet to helmet contact meaning this isn't targeting and it isn't spearing, it's lowering the head whether that be from the waist or from the neck.

When a running back picks up a blitzing linebacker, giving up 30 lbs or so, how do they do that now and how do you want them to do that if they can't go low?

There's plenty of small RBs who pick up an LB by redirecting him around the QB. It's kind of exactly the point to keep guys from putting their heads down where they get smacked by some other guy's knee, or bending down to "lower the hammer" and "finish a run". Short yardage will be about finding another way to gain leverage, which is the point. The point isn't to lead with the head or be a battering ram.

This doesn't ruin the game in any way for me. It hopefully makes it better because now there are fewer guys going in there leading with their head, as viewers who have followed the brain injury news coming out (and every single bit of it is bad. There's been no controversy or "well, this study shows it isn't as bad as we thought") cringe and wish that guy wouldn't do that.

The real key is whether this gets enforced, and how it gets enforced. I'm expecting that it'll just be on obvious plays at the beginning. And hopefully it's a lot better than the college "targeting" rule, where I get sick at the meathead commentators watching slo-mo replays every time it's called trying to explain away why it's not targeting. If a rule is going to mean something, then it has to be enforced consistently. There will still be too many "intent" calls, but we'll have to see how it gets called in games.

"Sharks do not go around challenging people to games of chance like dojo breakers."

I don't know what it will look like. Leverage is pad level. It's like telling a wrestler you can do anything but shoot.

Might be a better sport or a similar sport or a terrible sport, but if enforced as written, the game will look very very different. For a while overload blitzes will be impossible to pick up. I think the fullback is straight up an illegal position to play.

How vulnerable to these are hockey and soccer? Hockey still has a lot of big hits and honest-to-bog fights that would get people in other leagues ejected from games, and soccer has headers that are apparently almost as bad as repeated tackles in terms of impulse to the cranium. They rarely get the actual concussions, but I get the impression that CTE is less concussion and more repeated minor head trauma.

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How vulnerable to these are hockey and soccer? Hockey still has a lot of big hits and honest-to-bog fights that would get people in other leagues ejected from games, and soccer has headers that are apparently almost as bad as repeated tackles in terms of impulse to the cranium. They rarely get the actual concussions, but I get the impression that CTE is less concussion and more repeated minor head trauma.

Well, CTE is a progressive thing. It's kinda like arthritis: some people have a little, some people have it a lot worse. Some people it makes achy, some people it restricts movement, or even makes it impossible to walk or use an arm. So just identifying that people have CTE doesn't mean that they're going to suffer significant symptoms, but nor is it something that is not worth worrying about. From what I've read, it's seemingly a combination of susceptibility and an accumulation of traumas, both in number and in severity. That's why american football is seeing it the worst: it has both the most hits and the highest average impact force.

The last thing I read about soccer was that the headers aren't as bad, especially in terms of concussions, because of the expected nature of the impact ("purposeful heading"). The dangers are much higher from unexpected impacts, such as head-to-head, elbow-to-head, or even knee-to-head. But youth leagues have also banned heading in the sport, to reduce those repeated lower-force traumas, and also to remove a lot of the situations where people hit their heads on something else.

I think hockey has a huge problem, and that one's just going to get worse. And unlike banning heading in soccer, you can't really take the puck away in hockey, and that's a big source of the injuries. Women's hockey has a very high concussion rate, and women's sports report much higher concussion rates than men's sports, although noone has identified why.

"Sharks do not go around challenging people to games of chance like dojo breakers."